The 2 States Where Ronda Rousey Is More Popular Than Kim Kardashian

There's a certain purity to the act of searching. You can rather easily game Internet fame, or at least the illusion of it—there's an entire cottage industry of scammy services that deploy bots to fan, follow and fave social media accounts—but searching is just so...real. Innocent.

When Google gave Esquire.com its state-by-state rankings of the top-searched celebrities of 2015, the results were mostly (and maddeningly) predictable: Kim Kardashian topped the charts in 48 out of 50 states. Only New Mexico and Wyoming strayed from the pack: The celebrity those boxy flyover states searched for the most was Ronda Rousey. (Granted, Kim Kardashian was No. 2 in New Mexico and Wyoming. But still! Ronda beat Kim in two states!)

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

To put that another way, to search on "ronda rousey" is to inscribe in your personal Internet history (Google keeps a record of all your searches unless you specifically opt out; see google.com/history) the fact that at one point you achieved, at least fleetingly, a state of Ronda-curiosity. If you're living in Wyoming or New Mexico, you're quite literally in a (U.S.) state of peak Ronda-curiosity.

Most Popular

Of course, there are a lot of reasons to be Ronda-curious. In May, Sports Illustrated called her "the unbreakable Ronda Rousey" and declared her to be "the world's most dominant athlete." In August, she decisively confirmed that assessment, dispatching her opponent Bethe Correia at Rio de Janeiro's HSBC Arena in a mere 34 seconds to defend her UFC women's bantamweight title. (At a press conference afterward, Rousey mercilessly said of Correia: "You know, she was screaming in my face at weigh-ins. She was saying, 'Don't cry.' So I turned around to her after I knocked her out and I said, 'Don't cry.'")

And then in November she lost (holy shit!) her undefeated status by getting K.O.'d by Holly Holm—which, she told ESPN, made her "really fucking sad" (i.e., a pitch-perfect humanizing moment in her celebrity narrative). The stunning defeat perversely made her even more popular.

Wyoming's particular interest in Rousey is hard to decipher; it ranks dead-last among states by population (586,107) and was the 45th state in the union to legalize MMA fighting (in 2012). But New Mexicans, deliciously, have a very good reason to Google Rousey. Holly Holm, you see, is from Albuquerque; her hometown gave her a "Holm-coming" parade on Holly Holm Day after she broke the unbreakable Ronda Rousey.

Earlier this month, Rousey confirmed a rematch with Holm will be happening (date TBD); the event will surely be built up by the sport-media-industrial complex with WMD-grade hype.

Meanwhile, this weekend, Rousey has SNL.

An entertainer who's keenly focused on wider fame, Rousey already has big-screen credits (The Expendables 3, Furious 7). Now she gets to test her acting chops in a notoriously tough ring—live television—but no matter how she fares, "ronda rousey" searches will surely surge late Saturday night and Sunday. In every state across the land.

The Internet being the Internet, though, what might really make her mainstream-famous (instead of just athlete-famous) is the news that Ms. Rousey will appear in the upcoming Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue wearing nothing but a simulation of a swimsuit painted directly on her birthday suit.

How many servers will Google have to devote to processing just "ronda rousey photos" queries?